Question: WordPress User Roles and BuddyPress

I am new to the software stack, but I just now successfully installed and configured WordPress 3.0.1 with the current version of BuddyPress, the PageLines Platform Theme and several WordPress plug-ins.

My goal is to have a private community site, and I seem to have that now, but I’d like to understand the relationship between WordPress roles and BuddyPress members. If my goal with this site is primarily to support members who participate in group discussions and perhaps comment on articles that I post (as a WordPress admin or author), should I only give those users Subscriber roles? It’s not clear to me what BuddyPress members are allowed to do independently or dependent of their WordPress user role status. I’d appreciate a little explanation.

Other than site admin checks, BuddyPress doesn’t use or check for specific roles or capabilities anywhere. So, in terms of regular users, there is no difference between a subscriber and a contributor for the BuddyPress features.

Desha – good question. Paul – thanks for chiming in. What’s confusing, however, is that if I leave the “subscriber” role selected as the default for new users as part of the WP admin panel, a new user can still access the admin panel (and perform the normal Buddypress participation activities also). That said, if I select “blocked.” the user cannot see the /wp-admin console at all, but can still interact with the social/buddypress features …

i had a mail from soneone sayng joined but couldnt log in
i then looked on users and saw everyone is automaticallyy registered as a subscirber, which my logic would say reader and recieve feed updates but cant comment etc

what i need is that people can make groups themself and also post in the groups and forums, but not make blog posts or create or edit pages
I see no way to change or modify permissions, and there is no interface explainig the differences in permissions between subscriber and members, contributors editors and authors.. editor will have pages and posts i thin and author will just have blog section open ??

but member and subscriber.. what more can a member do what a subscriber can not? and if no difference, why in hell have two member roles for the same permissions?

Each user in the network can have different roles on different sites.
That mean on site1 he is editor, on site2 he is subscriber and so on. These roles are only taken into account in WordPress Toolbar – when visiting different sites with the (dis)ability to post on them.

I have 4 separate WP 3.5.1 and BP 1.6.4 installations. I have connected them via the CUSTOM_USER_TABLE CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE’ lines in the wp-config.php file. I have also installed the WP Orphan plugin.

When a person goes to one installation to register they will be given a user account and a blog site. When they go to one of the other installations they are there as a user but not having a site. In the admin listing of users, they are listed as a user in the ‘/’ (or admin) site, presumably as Subscriber role.

If I wanted the user to have sites the other installations as well being users what would I have to do then? Would I change the role to ‘Editor’ in the Orphan plugin, or is there another database that I would have to share?

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